The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss [Auchincloss, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Short stories, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780618718665
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2007-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

5. The Omelette and the Egg

KATE RAND had imbued her philosophy of life—that of a dedicated domestic wife and mother—from her own mother. Emma Laidlaw, a highly intelligent, smartly efficient, brisk but kindly lady, tall, straight, and strong, both in character and figure, had been left in 1900 a widow of limited means with six children at the age of forty. The Laidlaws were a huge, gregarious Manhattan tribe, some rich, some almost poor. Emma was nearer to the latter. Her assets had been a small portfolio of securities, an ordinary side street brownstone and three housemaids, a cook, a chambermaid, and a nurse, little enough in the opulent east side of the city of that day, where Irish servants were paid a pittance. But it was generally agreed among Emma's more affluent friends and relations that her skill in management amounted to genius. She was an expert cook and housecleaner when the servants had their rare days off; she was as good as a trained nurse when the children were sick; she drove a car before other women did and was clever at picking up stock market tips from the magnates she sat by at dinner parties. She knew just how to get her well-mannered children invited by richer friends or cousins with children the same age to go on trips or stay at country resorts, and even made those friends think she was doing them a favor. She became such an asset to hostesses, as much by her keen suggestions about how to make a party go as by her ability to charm and regulate bores, that she was able to carve out a permanent niche for herself in the top echelons of Knickerbocker society, assuring her offspring of the help of the powerful in making their way in life.

Kate, her eldest daughter and most faithful disciple, saw little better to do than to copy her remarkable parent in every way she could. She was aware of handicaps in herself totally lacking in her mother: she was more timid and shyer and inclined to give a romantic imagination too much leeway, but she had willpower, and Emma was a tolerant and benignant teacher. Nor did she ever try to persuade Kate that men were in any way either to be blamed for exerting dominance over women or deserving of such dominance. In fact, Kate suspected that her mother thought that few men had the capacity to accomplish what she had accomplished. Whatever force had created men had made them what they were, and that had to be accepted. And, anyway, in ceding them the world of downtown, were women ceding them anything that women really wanted?

Both Kate and her mother were avid readers, and the spare moments of a busy day were apt to be devoted to books, particularly to fiction. Kate's favorite hour was the one before supper, which Emma, even on nights when she was dining out in the great world, reserved for reading aloud to her older children.

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